CLI cheat sheets - which one do you prefer?

mal-2

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Hi

The manpages are often too big if you just want to look something up but help does not always provide an usage example. Close the terminal, open a browser and google the problem is therefore a solution but a very slow one. So luckily I found some projects which try to give some examples for the usage of a program.

Until now i've found
https://github.com/gleitz/howdoi

https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr

https://github.com/chrisallenlane/cheat

https://github.com/srsudar/eg

https://bropages.org

I tried cheat.sh a bit but the results are often too long to fit on my screen and in some cases (eg awk) there are simply to few functions covered to get at least some majority of my queries answered. So I had too look out for alternatives and trying no howdoi.
May be anybody here has also some expierence with one of these / similar programs?
 


I know them but I often have just one terminal window with a few clis open. Its in those situations more convenient to just enter a term in the console than bring the pdf in forground and looking through. Speaking about my 15" laptop. That of course change on a desktop with at least two displays.
 
So luckily I found some projects which try to give some examples for the usage of a program.

Interesting - I'll have to check out some of those. I didn't know that there were any programs like that, so it never occurred to me to look.

Its in those situations more convenient to just enter a term in the console than bring the pdf in forground and looking through.
But with the cheat-sheets - you don't have to have them open on your PC. You can always go old-school and print a physical, hard-copy of the cheat-sheet, laminate it and have it placed somewhere handy - like on your desk, in a drawer, in your laptop case, on your wall etc.

That's what I did during my first couple of years using linux. And is something I'd recommend to any new Linux users. Physically print some cheat sheets and keep them somewhere accessible, so you can quickly refer to them when you need to.

Nowadays, I have most things memorised. Whenever I get stuck on something, or forget something - I'll open up the man-pages or info pages and will run a quick search to find the information I'm looking for. A lot of the time you don't need to read through the entire man page from start to finish - simply search for some key-words to quickly jump to the information you are looking for.

And for any complex, common or repetetive tasks - I write shell-scripts in my personal bin directory (/home/yourusername/bin/), or if it's only a one-liner, I'll set up a bash alias or a bash function for it in my .bashrc.

That way, I don't have to remember a lot of complicated commands to do things. I can simply use my alias, function or script and pass it any parameters that are required (e.g. list of files to act upon, directory to output to, name of log-file, search paths, search terms etc.).
 
Hm. It seems even reasonable to print some sheets out. Honestly I would never have had that idea. I don't even remember when I used the last time something on paper and its probably more than a decade.

But the shell is usually quite convenient. I split it simply in a couple of tiles and can also google some topics and open them if necessary in lynx. Or translate if I need to . Basically there are only different firefox profiles, keepass, claws and some terminals in use. ¨

When I'm not sure which argument comes for a commands I hit just tab and the completion shows me the options.. The cheat sheets I use mostly for shell scripting or a bit more complex programs. And often I can lose myself hoping from one man page to another and so on. It takes me may be longer to finish my momentary task as if i would just work straight on but there's such an insane amount of interesting stuff. And its literally everything documented letting me dig deeper with each topic.

So at the moment there are not much repetitive tasks its more an exploration from virtualization over networking to dns docker awk beginning to monitor everything creating vpns and instaling mailserver... The more I learn the more I recognize what I could also study a bit more.
 
But with the cheat-sheets - you don't have to have them open on your PC. You can always go old-school and print a physical, hard-copy of the cheat-sheet, laminate it and have it placed somewhere handy - like on your desk, in a drawer, in your laptop case, on your wall etc.

Old school always works! :) In my first days learning Linux - which I'm still at it - I used to create these wallpapers with some basic commands and/or have a note pinned to my desktop so I could always take a look for anything I needed. It's been a long journey since then and now I have the ones I use the most memorized, but still use those cheat sheets when needed, they're there for some reason.
 

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